A great many distractions

RYGCBMKO is pottering along despite low motivation, lack of time/energy and some big distractions. In addition to the stresses of the day job, I’ve come down with a hopefully minor case of Eurorack to go with my broader case of voltage-controlled music making and electronics.

A circular gradient was quantised and fed into the hue component of a Combine HSV node.

Ironically, researching Eurorack for hours a day has taken up much of the time I’d otherwise be using to make music or video. This probably an excellent sign that I should put it to one side until my housing and power supply arrive, instead of spending hours on Modulargrid designing a rack for someone with about ten times as much disposable income as I have.

Metaballs with some normal distortion applied to a quantised dot product sent to hue, joined by many NURBS toruses.

So. When it’s finally time to sit down and work on a little shot every day, it’s something I never seem to have much time to plan or iterate or polish before it’s time to switch off the machines and get to sleep. Nothing’s really amazing. To add to the pain points, Blender’s usual rock solid stability is gone. I’m not sure whether it’s Animation Nodes or v2.78b or a combination. Autosaves have made the crashes a bit more bearable.

A stream of pulsating metaballs. I used the “quantised dot product to hue” thing a lot this week.

Still, there’s positives coming out of this. The shots I like the most feature structures that read like little single-celled organisms going about their day, so I could probably play some more on that. I feel like I’m getting a sense for what works and what doesn’t, and playing with techniques like visual echo and delay at edit time are proving quite interesting.